(See below for link to article in the Maine Wire) Date: Monday, November 16, 2020 Subject: Expert report reveals weaknesses of RCV | The Maine Wire To: Forest Simmons <fsimmons@pcc.edu> Article in the Maine Wire about disaffection with RCV. The two main concerns (1) decreased voter "participation" due to difficulty of ranking long lists of candidates. (2) winners elected with less than fifty percent support of the ballots due to incomplete rankings. Comments from RCV advocates blamed these problems on the poor quality of the electorate. It is just as Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) predicted in 1884. And not knowing about Dodgson's Asset Voting or (Eppley's VPR) they seemed to believe that RCV simply HAD to be considered voter friendly because they could not imagine a real voter friendly solution to the wasted vote/ spoiler problem. https://www.themainewire.com/2020/07/expert-report-reveals- weaknesses-of-rcv/ Those who have not followed the thread Yes/?/No can find more discussion on the importance of voter friendly ballots for public elections in that thread. Sent from my MetroPCS 4G LTE Android Device

The Maine Wire? That's an outlet of an outlet highly partisan, right-wing think tank that believes RCV is bad for conservatives. I don't think you'll find good faith arguments there. It talks about the number of voters that did not "fully participate" under RCV, which is defined as "ranking at least all but one candidate." So by this definition, a Maine voter that ranked Biden first and then no one else would have not "fully participated," even though there was no question that their ballot would make it to the final round? That's not a useful measure. I think a relevant measure is what fraction of voters ultimately expressed a preference between the two frontrunners. and RCV (regardless of what you think of it in relation to other methods), was a clear improvement in that regard. Greg

I was hoping readers would consult the thread that I mentioned to see the context ... what are the perceived concerns of small town voters ... their psychological barriers to acceptance of anything more complicated than FPP elections? As I mentioned in previous posts in this thread (Yes/?/No) none of the typical small town objections have anything to do with actual method defects ... which of Arrow's axioms or which of Woodall's conditions might be violated. Small town complaints are totally about what seem like trivial concerns to EM list readers. But if we want to get anything better than FPP adopted, we cannot just say "people like that are too stupid to vote," as at least one comment put it. The one thing I hear over and over when I ask students (after three weeks of studying mathematics of social choice), "Which is your favorite of all the election methods that we have studied?" ... "My favorite is Majority Rule, because that's Democracy!" Help! Aussies are not allowed to truncate their rankings ... such a ballot cannot be accepted .. because of the Majority fetish. Hence the use of "candidate cards" and voting "the party line" which can be done without actually copying the party ranking into your ballot. Which brings us to the main problem that we ignore at our peril ... voters do not consider rankings to be voter friendly .. something Charles Dodgson pointed out in 1884. His solution was what we now call Asset Voting. Steve Eppley's solution is what we call VPR ... Vote a Published Ranking which automates copying candidate cards for those who feel a need for that service. Most people, even educated people, are not familiar with these (and other) voter friendly solutions to the wasted vote/ spoiler problem. So let's spread the word! Thanks for your input and enthusiasm! On Tuesday, November 17, 2020, Greg Dennis <greg.dennis@voterchoicema.org> wrote: > The Maine Wire? That's an outlet of an outlet highly partisan, right-wing > think tank that believes RCV is bad for conservatives. I don't think you'll > find good faith arguments there. > > It talks about the number of voters that did not "fully participate" under > RCV, which is defined as "ranking at least all but one candidate." So by > this definition, a Maine voter that ranked Biden first and then no one else > would have not "fully participated," even though there was no question that > their ballot would make it to the final round? That's not a useful measure. > > I think a relevant measure is what fraction of voters ultimately expressed > a preference between the two frontrunners. and RCV (regardless of what you > think of it in relation to other methods), was a clear improvement in that > regard. > > Greg >